I teach at Lehigh University in eastern Pennsylvania. I work on British colonialism, modernism, postcolonial/global literature, and the digital humanities.

Friday, February 25, 2005

"Our Godless Constitution," and the Treaty with Tripoli

Brooke Allen, at the Nation, has an essay on the Godlessness of the U.S. Constitution and the founding fathers. It's essentially a remix of Susan Jacoby's book Freethinkers, and about half a dozen recent op-ed type essays she's published along the same line.

As Ralph Luker points out, the paydirt in the piece is really Allen's citation of the U.S.'s 1797 "Treaty of Peace and Friendship" with Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [Muslims] --and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

I agree with Luker that such phrasing -- which was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 -- would be inconceivable today.

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Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in 2018.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All three are currently in progress as of summer 2017.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.